House of Eratosthenes

Our liberals and our newspaper editors, but I repeat myself, have thrown themselves with great gusto into a mission to get the gun control debate back into the headlines, with no small amount of bullying force applied to the popular will. Once again, they’re going to tell the rest of us what to think. They’ve tried this before, and failed. Columbine happened, they tried again, they failed. This time they’ll try harder still.

New York Times, April 17:

Our hearts and the hearts of all Americans go out to the victims and their families. Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.

Cherry-picked reader responses to the editorial, April 18:

How many mass shootings, how much loss, how much grief will it take before our legislators are finally willing to stand up to the National Rifle Association and pass meaningful gun control legislation?
:
How many more people will have to die before our leaders will have the sense and the guts to take on the National Rifle Association and honor the wishes of a majority of Americans who want gun control?
:
When will America join the civilized world and realize the absolute stupidity of its gun laws? Your leaders are not brave enough to stand up to the gun lobby; therefore, shootings like Monday’s will continue to occur.

Sniff…sniff…smells like…coordinated phony “grassroots” talking points being circulated. How does the old maxim go? “When the facts are on your side, pounds the facts; when the law is on your side pound the law. When neither is on your side, pound the table.”

Tables beware!

Our democrats have been alternating between beating their chests that “The People Have Spoken,” and huddling together to try to figure out what The People said. They’ve spent all year not knowing what to do — and now they think they’ve been handed an event on a silver platter and they can leverage it to get more gun control. There are several reasons for wanting to do this, and not a single one of them have to do with making anyone safer. Hint: The scene of Monday’s tragedy already had gun control. There was an attempt last year to fix that, and it failed. That bill could’ve saved some of the thirty-plus victims who are now dead. The New York Times editors and all others who greet that notion with some skepticism, are invited to ponder: In which activity do you think yourself more likely to score thirty points? Laser-tag, or whack-a-mole? In an environment with strict gun control, the carrier of semi-automatic pistols and multiple magazines is engaged in the latter. You might say he’s implementing the ultimate “point-and-click” user interface. It’s a miracle he didn’t take down even more.

Well, if the gun-grabbers don’t want to protect anyone, what do they want to do? Once you can get the United States to become a progressive Euro-pansy nation, you’ve shown you can get the same thing done anywhere else. It’s a political message. The United States is the king of the mountain. The One To Beat. Besides, our democrat Congress is badly in need of political messages to send. We have our first female House Speaker…and democrats and smarter-folks all the nation over are asking — so what? What’s she done? Getting a gun-grabbing bill on the President’s desk would go miles toward answering that.

It’s certainly a daunting task. Like any other liberal idea, gun control doesn’t look good and there aren’t many ways to make it look good. We should all keep in mind what a stiff challenge these gun-grabbing liberals have taken on for themselves.

How do you make a liberal idea look sensible? It turns out there are really only three ways.

Obfuscation. This is the offering that all solutions to the given problem, save the most liberal one, are products of overly simplistic ways of thinking. It exploits an interesting facet of human psychology. If you offer anything else intellectual in nature, people would look to you to provide substantive support to what you offered — but when you offer this, you can claim yourself exempt from such an expectation. The expectation itself, you can argue, is a manifestation that your point hasn’t been fairly considered. Regarding the problem at hand, anytime someone comes back to it and produces a conclusion you don’t like, you can simply accuse them of thinking in overly-simplistic terms.

You would think, then, this tactic would be available only to the geniuses among us. Isn’t it necessary to not only think in those complex terms, but produce a real solution to the problem at hand and then defend it against attack? Au contrair, whoever said such a thing. This is just “Emperor’s New Clothes” stuff in its purest form. Look at the September 11 attacks and the immediate aftermath…”what is it we could have done, to make people around the world want to do such an awful thing to us?”

Is it really simplistic thinking to say “men killed thousands of innocents in a horrible way, they are dead but belong to an organization, that organization needs to be squished like a bug”? Is that really simplistic? Perhaps, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is overly-simplistic. Speaking for myself, over five years later I’m still waiting to hear what these complicatedly-thinking geniuses have to say about what to do. I know what we’ve done that they don’t like…I know who they don’t like…that’s about all. Therein lies the benefits to obfuscation, you never really have to say what’s going on or what you’d do about it. You just criticize others.

That’s probably why Sen. John Kerry used it so much during the election of ’04 with such phony words as “nuance,” going from one end of the season to the other without ever saying specifically what he’d do about things — and address why, in a medium receptive to intrusive questions from oppositional forces, the things he would do were likely to achieve success.

Misrepresentation. Simply misstate what the problem is, or what the proposed solutions are. It is exceptionally potent, especially when the misrepresentation is supported by phonetics. Gun control falls into this category since it is frequently summarized as legislation “to get rid of all these guns lying around.” As I noted above, Monday’s rampage took place in a gun-control environment. It stands as a splendid example of what gun control does, and does not, do. It does not “get rid of all the guns.” It ensures that everyone who owns or uses guns, by process-of-elimination, is a law-breaker.

Minimum wage is another example of the phonetics lending support to the effort to misrepresent. The phrase “raise the minimum wage” carries a concise, and strong, suggestion that something is being increased. Who but the most heartless bastard can resist doing that? But in fact, an increase to the minimum wage increases nothing except a statutory parameter. Minimum wage laws, both in design and in effect, simply define a subclass of transactions and make all qualifying transactions illegal. Increasing the minimum wage simply changes the way this definition is done, by declaring more transactions illegal. Will those jobs be changed so they can become legal again, in other words, have their compensation increased? Perhaps. Sometimes. It’s not up to the Congress or to the state legislatures to decide that though.

Some insist there are studies that say the unemployment rate goes down when the minimum wage goes up. (Invariably, my own ability to call this into question is attacked since I don’t have an accounting degree and I’m not any kind of labor analyst.) And yet I can’t help noticing. If I am to accept this, I must accept the following as well:

You can have lots and lots of representations of something. You can define a subset within that thing, and declare the subset illegal. And as a result of you declaring that subset illegal, where the subset was not illegal before (or the subset was narrower before)…you now have more of the thing. Maybe it’s my lack of education talking, but it seems to me if you can collect data to support that, there’s something wrong with the way you’ve collected the data. That, or the rules don’t have quite as much of an effect on what’s being done, as you have presumed.

Carping. It’s not hard to gather an example of this. Just get in an argument with a liberal and use the names “Bush,” “Rove” or “Cheney” in any context you wish save for a negative one. Leave some sneering undone, let the other party respond…presto.

Liberals, you see, are to snarking and carping about Bush/Cheney/Rove, as straight men are to staring at a beautiful woman’s ample bosom. They behave as if they don’t take the opportunity, and someone catches them, they’ll get in trouble.

But once the carp-fest has started logic is invariably abandoned. Our liberals all know this. It’s their way of taking a “breather.” Except when you take a buddy to the gym, who isn’t quite as in-shape as you are, when his breather’s done he’ll get back into the game again. The carping liberal, I’ve noticed over time, is done for good. And that’s always struck me as a bit funny, because you don’t have to wait long before our liberals tell us their ideas would make a lot of sense if “given a fair hearing.”

And then they’re almost always the first to storm out of the room with a bunch of name-calling and snarking about Bush/Fox-News/Halliburton etc.

Just speaking for myself, I’ve filed all of the liberal arguments into those three buckets. I’m going to be accutely interested in the first argument I hear or read that demands a fourth file-folder to be fetched and labeled.

We’re talking about the lives of innocent people here. If liberals have something to say in support of gun control that doesn’t fall into Obfuscation, Misrepresentation or Carping, let’s hear it.

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To Make Liberal Ideas Look GoodWednesday, April 18th, 2007

To Make Liberal Ideas Look Good
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007